High Altitude Homesteading

Menu

Sunday Homestead Update

BBQ Sauce for the 4th

We are hosting a BBQ at the farm for our extended family this year on the 4th of July. We have been busy preparing, cleaning up and organizing the farm, crafting decorations, and cooking. I decided to make this delicious BBQ Sauce recipe, from the Humble Food Snob. I have made, and canned, this recipe before and our family loves it. I decided to make a huge batch so that we would have some for the 4th, but also so I could can some for us to use in the coming months.

We ended up with 2 quarts to use for the BBQ, and in the coming weeks, and I canned 9 pints. YUM!

Heritage Arts

I frogged the Reyna shawl that I started last week. I felt like the pattern looked very pretty in the variegated yarn in the pattern photo, but in my solid-colored yarn the pattern seemed boring. I wanted something with more pizzazz. So once I took apart the Reyna, I cast the yarn on with the Swallowtail Lace Shawl pattern by Evelyn Clark Designs.

Chickens

Last week we bought 12 hatching eggs so that our broody hen, Eve, could set. I started them in the incubator because she is too small to set 12. At day-3 candling 1 was rotten, 2 were infertile, 5 were fertile and looked healthy, and 4 looked questionable. So we put the 5 good ones under Eve and took away her ceramic ones. I threw away the rotten one and the infertile ones. And I left the 4 questionable ones in the incubator until Friday, when I found that of the 4 questionable eggs was infertile, 1 was good, and the other two were early deaths (blood ring). So Eve is now happily setting on 6 eggs, and the incubator is back in storage.

And then there were three…We started with 8 cockerels and butchered 2 a couple weeks ago. This week we butchered another 3, leaving 3 for me to pick from for next year’s future flock breeding roo. We have been rating them on the qualities we are looking for and watching them as they mature in order to decide who will stay and who will go. In this batch of 3 that we butchered we had quite a size difference between the smaller two and the largest one.

This time around the older two kiddos wanted to see if they are able to do the whole process of butchering on their own. So Mtn Man did the first one, then Young Man and Sunshine each did one on their own after that. It is pretty exciting that our older kids are now capable of butchering a chicken start to finish on their own.

In another month or so we will likely butcher the final two, leaving just one breeding roo for next year.

That’s the update on what has been going on around Willow Creek Farm this week. 🙂

Welcome to Willow Creek Farm!

We are happy to have you visiting us!
I am wife to an amazing man ("Mountain Man") for 17 years now. We have been blessed with 5 children. Two girls: "Sunshine" (12) and "Little Miss" (10). And three boys: "Young Man" (14), "Braveheart" (8), and "Mr. Smiles" (1).
I enjoy being a wife and homemaker, homeschooling mom, farm girl, and helping my husband run our custom fiber processing mill.
In this blog we are sharing what we learn as we build and run our little homestead at high-altitude to provide natural, home-raised food for our family.

Come walk with us through the ups and downs of family farming in the Rocky Mountains!